Steam, Origin Users Caught In The Crossfire Of Hacker DDOS Attacks

The wave of DDOS attacks launched at video game servers continues, as entities claim takedowns of servers for Origin and (I’m sure this will piss you off to no end) Steam, in retaliation to each other. Battle.net's servers were also attacked.

A warning before you continue below: we're sharing the tweets here as evidence, so as a result we really can't get around the foul language used by the people involved. We apologize in advance.

Let’s start with DERP, who seem to be huge Gabe fans as they frequently make reference to him when launching these attacks.  They tweeted about attacking EA’s Origin login servers on 7 PM PST the day before, and kept their attack going for three hours. EA’s support Twitter account did acknowledge and notify users about the attack within that time frame, as well as their actions to fix these issues.

Obviously, since DERP are huge fans, they would not have tried pulling an attack on Steam itself. For that, we have a new pair of hackers claiming to take Steam’s servers down on 10 PM PST. At least one developer independently confirmed the Steam downtime on their end.

Here, sadly, is where it gets petty and really, really frustrating. One of the new hacker pair claims they took down Steam because of DERP’s actions. They say they are Battlefield fans and say outright that DERP is the reason they instigated the attack. They also claim to having taken down other sites prior to this, such as Club Penguin and Rockstar Games, although we have no verification for these. They ended their tweets with a warning that they would be going after Steam again soon.

EA and Valve should consider themselves warned ; and so should you, if you own a Steam and/ or an Origin account. Make sure to verify and secure your accounts now. To be clear, there’s no sign that these groups are going after personal or credit card information at the moment, but are you really going to take chances at this juncture? We do hope these attacks end soon, so that it can stop putting such a damper on the start of the year.